Education: Harvard and Beyond: The University Under Siege

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Berkeley's Chancellor Roger Heyns disagrees: "We should play an advisory and consultative role, but the university should never be a political action unit. I don't think we should run things." Says Ray Heffner, president of Brown University: "The university must not be aloof from the most pressing problems of our time. And yet the university cannot be so committed to transforming society along definite lines that it loses its function as objective analyst and critic of society."

This disagreement between activist students and the men who run the universities will continue to provide occasions for demonstrations and disorders. Even so, the university must remain what Rosemary Park calls "the place where discussion between generations is possible." Above all, it must have the courage to remain independent, refusing to seek approval for approval's sake, whether from students, politicians or the public at large.

Such courage ought to be the ultimate product of last week's ugly confrontation at Harvard. The lesson is that force, at best, offers only temporary solutions. What the American university needs above all is a new integrity—moral authority, the unsolicited respect of the young and the old alike. Only thus can the university be immune to extremism and able to follow its calling of truth and reason—the role that Sir Eric Ashby of Cambridge University defined as providing an "environment for the continuous polishing of one mind by another."